Overview

An ambitious look at the African novel and its connections to African philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries The African Novel of Ideas focuses on the role of the philosophical novel and the place of philosophy more broadly in the intellectual life of the African continent, from the early twentieth century to today. Examining works from the Gold Coast, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, and tracing how such writers as J. E. Casely Hayford, Imraan Coovadia, Tendai Huchu, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Stanlake Samkange reconcile deep contemplation with their social situations, Jeanne-Marie Jackson offers a new way of reading and understanding African literature. Jackson begins with Fante anti-colonial worldliness in pre-nationalist Ghana, moves through efforts to systematise Shona philosophy in 1970s Zimbabwe, looks at the Ugandan novel Kintu as a treatise on pluralistic rationality, and arrives at the treatment of 'philosophical suicide' by current southern African writers. As Jackson charts philosophy's evolution from a dominant to marginal presence in African literary discourse across the past hundred years, she assesses the push and pull of subjective experience and abstract thought. The first major transnational exploration of African literature in conversation with philosophy, The African Novel of Ideas redefines the place of the African experience within literary history.

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9780691186450

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Reviews

""Honorable Mention for the Book of the Year Award, African Literature Association"" ""Jackson raises essential questions for a field yet to appreciate fully the extent to which African literature contributes to and problematizes disciplinary debates. . . . The African Novel of Ideas provides excellent navigation across an impressive and conceptually challenging range of material.""---Joseph Hankinson, Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation ""The African Novel of Ideas, which draws impressively on literature from all Anglophone regions of sub-Saharan Africa, is an important study not only for those of us who think with African literature but also for those who are invested in a more thoughtful comparative method.""---Yuan-Chih (Sreddy) Yen, Research in African Literatures ""The African Novel of Ideas gives us a historiographical exposition of how the intellectual landscape of pre- and post-independence Akan literature is determined by a struggle of competing philosophical principles rather than by a clearly delineated dichotomy of colonialist dialectics.""---Benjamin Kreitz, Theoria ""Jackson is a muscular, masterful critic who strikes many blows, and strikes them with pinpoint accuracy. She puts her argument forth in a lucid and polemical fashion that dispatches with many of the regnant orthodoxies of African studies. . . . [S]he offers a vision of African literature that is indisputably worthwhile and challenging. Her book should open important debates within African studies, at the very least asking critics to take more seriously an alternate canon of African writing and thinking.""---Timothy Wright, Comparative Literature

"""Honorable Mention for the Book of the Year Award, African Literature Association"" ""Jackson raises essential questions for a field yet to appreciate fully the extent to which African literature contributes to and problematizes disciplinary debates. . . . The African Novel of Ideas provides excellent navigation across an impressive and conceptually challenging range of material.""---Joseph Hankinson, Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation ""The African Novel of Ideas, which draws impressively on literature from all Anglophone regions of sub-Saharan Africa, is an important study not only for those of us who think with African literature but also for those who are invested in a more thoughtful comparative method.""---Yuan-Chih (Sreddy) Yen, Research in African Literatures ""The African Novel of Ideas gives us a historiographical exposition of how the intellectual landscape of pre- and post-independence Akan literature is determined by a struggle of competing philosophical principles rather than by a clearly delineated dichotomy of colonialist dialectics.""---Benjamin Kreitz, Theoria"

Author Information

Jeanne-Marie Jackson is assistant professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the author of South African Literature's Russian Soul.

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